Announcements

Underdawg did an excellent job of explaining the rules. Here's the simplified version:
Don't insinuate Pedo. Warning and or timeout for a first offense. PermaFlick for any subsequent offenses
Don't out members. See above for penalties. Caveat: if you have ever used your own real name or personal information here on the forums since, like, ever - it doesn't count and you are fair game.
If you see spam posts, report it to the mods. We do not hang out in every thread 24/7
If you see any of the above, report it to the mods by hitting the Report button in the offending post.
We do not take action for foul language, off-subject content, or abusive behavior unless it escalates to persistent stalking. There may be times that we might warn someone or flick someone for something particularly egregious. There is no standard, we will know it when we see it. If you continually report things that do not fall into rules #1 or 2 above, you may very well get a timeout yourself for annoying the Mods with repeated whining. Use your best judgement.
Warnings, timeouts, suspensions and flicks are arbitrary and capricious. Deal with it. Welcome to anarchy.
If you are a newbie, there are unwritten rules to adhere to. They will be explained to you soon enough.

Recent Profile Visitors

"The voters knew his circumstances when they elected him."
Right there in his released tax documents.
The emoluments clause was supposed to take care of the conflicts but T is the first to push the limits in this manner. Others believed that avoiding the appearance of conflict of interests was important, this president obviously does not.

"but I have to ask, is it the guns or society that has changed?"
Both. In the 50's, the US was still very rural, we didn't know the health impacts of exposure to lead, schools were segregated (willing to bet the number of black high schools with shooting ranges was minimal), the standard service rifle was an 8 round semi-auto and the disruption of society brought on by the Civil Rights period had yet to occur. People believed the government and press, had yet to see the rioting of the '60's or the defeat in Viet Nam or impeachment hearings of a sitting president.

" I don't know of it ever being a problem in the past. "
Because we've never had a president in the past that continued to operate a business whose major asset was simple name recognition nor a president whose business overlapped foreign policy so directly.
And why was Jr. invited to speak at a conference on foreign policy where, while he might not be speaking "for the government' people will be hearing him as doing so?

In one case, I was sure the kid wasn't going to bring a gun but I couldn't NOT report it. The penalty for being wrong, morally as well as legally, was too large. We didn't expel the kid, and he didn't face criminal charges but he was suspended for a few days. Even Mom had to admit that if her child was just one in the room rather than the kid making the statement, she'd want it reported. Dad, with the jailhouse tattoos, was less understanding.

Edited slightly, citation provided.
Require permits to purchase
One clear flaw in federal gun laws is that prospective buyers do not get background checks when buying from private sellers,... In a 2009 study involving 53 cities Webster and his colleagues found this approach, ... was linked with a 68 percent reduced risk of guns being diverted to criminals post-sale. But after Missouri repealed its permit-to-purchase handgun law in 2007, firearm homicide rates increased by 25 percent, a j...also linked with a 52 percent increase in handgun murders of law enforcement officers ...
Permit-to-purchase approaches are more effective than seller-focused comprehensive or universal background checks. One reason is that sellers who fail to conduct checks are rarely punished....Another major flaw with universal checks is that relevant information is not always reported to agencies to be included in the background check database. ...
—Ban individuals convicted of any violent crime from gun purchase
... California...: In 1991 the state passed a law preventing individuals with violent convictions from buying guns. ...Convicts who were allowed to buy guns before the law passed were nearly 30 percent more likely to be arrested later for a gun crime or other violent act ...
—Make all serious domestic violence offenders surrender firearms
The federal statute preventing domestic violence criminals from having guns has a big loophole: Guns often aren’t taken away unless criminals voluntarily relinquish them ... an October 2017 study found that these “relinquishment” laws are nearly 50 percent more effective than non-relinquishment laws at reducing intimate partner violence.
... A 2015 report by the Congressional Research Service found more than one fifth of all public mass shootings between 1999 and 2013 were precipitated in part by domestic disputes. During this period there were also 127 nonpublic mass shootings in the U.S. that involved an individual killing at least four family members. ...
—Temporarily ban active alcohol abusers from firearms
... Wintemute’s research suggests people with DUIs (driving under the influence) are four to five times as likely as people with no criminal record to be arrested for a violent crime in the future. ...
The evidence, taken together, shows these four laws could make a significant dent in U.S. gun violence if implemented in every state. In particular they could reduce the terrible death toll from mass shootings. Given the apathetic track record of U.S. Congress and many state governments, it’s unclear whether our country has the political will to make these changes. We do, however, have a good sense of how effective these changes would be.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/4-laws-that-could-stem-the-rising-threat-of-mass-shootings/
Rights & Permissions
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

"I don't know the answer, but it ain't frothing at the mouth fanaticism with a good dose of hypocrisy mixed in. That stuff gets everybody nowhere"
Agreed, but we see quite a bit from the small minded anarchists as well as the starry eyed utopians.

"I don't personally have an attitude of "fuck the rest of you", more like "just don't fuck with me".'
But as your actions get closer to impacting others, the line between the two attitudes gets thinner and thinner. Don't tread on me was a lot more relevant when population density was measured in miles per person rather than persons per mile.

"Try having some empathy for each other. I’ll let you in on a little secret, it won’t kill you if you try it."
We never had much practice or the need to practice. We were so predominately Western European Protestant early, then left alone for a century to let the attitudes harden. Immigrant groups were expected, violently sometimes, to assimilate and groups that wouldn't were beaten into submission. Only in the last 60 years have we been forced to acknowledge that there is a different way of looking at society. Empathy requires the ability to project the feelings of another, we have only recently had to accept the existence of 'other" and a goodly population doesn't like it.

Tom, talking to you is fruitless; your mind travels in deeply grooved trenches that circle around to the same cesspools. If there is every any evidence that you actually entertain a new or original thought, I may resume responding to you but until then I will not.

"Satan calls one of his children home...
Really? Simplistic, a product of his times and a bit of a con but I think he was a true believer. Like Aimee Semple McPhearson, he mastered a new media and stayed in the game.

""Raise the national savings rate."
The difficulty is the people that have benefited from the current changes, including everyone here, would have to pay for the changes. Take the above suggestion, for banks to pay rates above inflation, the prime rate has to go up, driving up borrowing costs and slowing growth as well as dramatically increasing the national debt (the original reason for Greenspan driving money OUT of savings under Clinton) requiring a tax increase in a slowing economy. Look at Congress, could this happen? When one guy can write the Speaker of the House a $300,000 check for passing a tax bill? Go through the list and game out the impacts while figuring out who pays; can it happen?

"Which sounds kinda like moar machine guns."
Based on the track record of Class III weapons used in commission of felonies, why a problem with more legal machine guns? It's why I keep harping (Gawd, if I start sounding like Tom someone throw a rock at me) on classifying AR and AK systems, a gun control system that we've tried and works.